Xandra Ibarra is a well-practiced Chicana artist also known as La Chica Boom has a wide variety of different mediums in her work, including sculpture, photography, print, performance, and video. Looking through her website one can see that a lot of her work utilizes similar elements but they are all utilized in different ways to accommodate the message of each piece which I found very interesting. The piece that I found to be the most interesting was Training for Exhaustion. It was a performance piece where Ibara took on the role of hypnotist and training instructor, she led sixteen strangers through a performance jog in Lake Merritt in Oakland, California. The goal was to make the group have the corporeality of a cockroach. Each participant has visors that were called “cucaracha lenses” and hypnotized to adopt all aspects of a cockroach and while running they all listened to audio to feature cockroach facts. The overall meaning of the peace “considers fatigue, as opposed to refusal and/or liberation, as a primary mode of being in our current moment.” Normally cockroaches are viewed as nuisances that are almost impossible to kill,and in this performance “their goal was to build stamina to be sick and tired of being sick and tired.” They are learning to adopt those same characteristics that make cockroaches strong enough to survive so much stress. What I found the most interesting about this piece was the accompanying visuals and graphics on Ibarra's website. You can really see all the details in the piece and get an overall sense just from the photographs. My favorite photos were the ones with the model in full attire and the photos were taken in this kind of multiple exposure style, it really shows off the cockroach theme in the piece as well as the element of hypnosis that was implemented in the performance aspect. Overall I think it is a very striking and unique performance piece. My question is how long would a project of this scale take to plan since there are many elements that go into making this performance?
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